Series · nine short pieces
I write about the human context of the challenges and opportunities faced by ambitious founders, leaders and entrepreneurs in startups and scale-ups. This is the collection: why the traditional way of working is broken, and how you build a company that fits how humans actually work.
We must become more human, not less.
There has been a consistent push to run our society in ways that are not sustainable. I would call it exploitation, and it is true of human work too. The symptoms are there to see: we push humans too hard, and we celebrate it in how we train people and run businesses.
The conventional reading is that the individual should get better at enduring it. The alternative is that the way itself is broken — and that we need to rethink what it means to be human at work.
Start with the timeline: how long have you felt like this consistently? Days, weeks, months? The answer decides whether you have a planning problem or a regime problem.
If you want to build a company better aligned with how humans really work, it starts by setting out a clear view of what it means to be human. Most companies have inherited a view they never chose.
Put the two side by side: are humans employees or whole beings? Do they need controlling, or can they be trusted? Are they rational or psychological creatures? Does energy develop linearly or in pulses? Are breaks wasted time or productive time? Is growth career advancement or personal development?
Try it as an experiment: answer for your own company, then ask three of your people for their answers. The gap is your real view of humans.
There have been a lot of misconceptions about what drives humans. Science has helped us revise them, but management practice usually trails a couple of decades behind.
Extrinsic motivation — salary, bonus, promotion, competition — works, but only on a narrow slice of work. What carries over time is care, autonomy, meaning, connection and purpose. We need to be seen, to feel that we make a difference, and to be connected to others.
That changes what your job as a leader is: less incentive design, more building the conditions people thrive under.
Performance does not happen under control and strict oversight. It happens when people are given trust, autonomy and clear containers to move inside.
Trust is not a mood. It is built from three things you can work on separately: consistency, competence and sincerity. If one falls, trust falls — and each of the three failures needs a different repair.
Nor is empathy compassion at a distance. It is active listening, collecting data points, and a place where people can put both professional and personal obstacles on the table without paying for it afterwards.
Most leaders I meet believe that admitting mistakes costs authority. My experience is the opposite: that is exactly where people start believing in you.
Competent humans at work are able to be open about their shortcomings and weaknesses — and to admit mistakes when they happen. It is a skill, not a personality trait, and it has to be practised.
The line is offloading. You share what makes you reachable. You do not offload your own unrest onto your people — that is someone else’s job to carry.
Traditional performance metrics alone are insufficient for what we are facing. Five principles carry the work I do with teams: Humanity, Understanding, Mindfulness, Authenticity, Nurture.
In practice that means seeing people as whole individuals with their own backgrounds, building active listening into the team’s habits, protecting presence over constant availability, leading with openness — and taking personal development as seriously as professional development.
This is not opposed to high performance. It is the version of it that lasts more than four quarters.
I deeply believe that as AI takes over more and more of what used to be human functions, our chance to remain relevant lies in becoming even more human. Not less.
It forces a question most companies have been able to postpone: what is it that humans actually contribute? Emotions, curiosity, judgement, belonging, craft, reading a room. These are not soft add-ons — they are the edge.
The optimistic reading is that the machines take the commoditised work and we get the human part back. It only holds if someone actively leads for it. Otherwise the gain is merely speed.
Four days sounds human. But if the same work is squeezed into fewer days, we have not changed the regime — we have just made the factory floor narrower.
The interesting question is not the number of days, but how energy flows across the week, and whether the organisation accepts that humans recharge in breaks and downtime, not only on holiday.
And then the uncomfortable follow-up: is the most human company for everyone? I am not sure. I am sure that most have not tried.
You do not need to restructure your company to begin. You begin by making your own internal regime visible: are you running yourself like a factory floor producing commoditised goods, or like a high-end creative studio?
Then you take a single area: how the week is planned, how feedback is given, how breaks are treated. One thing at a time, tested in your reality, with something real at stake.
If you are sceptical, try it out for a month and see what happens. I would like to hear how it went.
Sceptical about one of them? Try the experiment and drop me a note on how it worked out.
